Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech

Chapter 5: Form in Language: Grammatical Concepts

We have seen that the single word expresses either a simple concept or a
combination of concepts so interrelated as to form a psychological unity.
We have, furthermore, briefly reviewed from a strictly formal standpoint
the main processes that are used by all known languages to affect the
fundamental concepts-those embodied in unanalyzable words or in the radical
elements of words-by the modifying or formative influence of subsidiary
concepts. In this chapter we shall look a little more closely into the
nature of the world of concepts, in so far as that world is reflected and
systematized in linguistic structure.

Let us begin with a simple sentence that involves various kinds of
concepts-the farmer kills the duckling. A rough and ready analysis
discloses here the presence of three distinct and fundamental concepts that
are brought into connection with each other in a number of ways. These
three concepts are "farmer" (the subject of discourse), "kill" (defining
the nature of the activity which the sentence informs us about), and
"duckling" (another subject[1] of discourse that takes an important though
somewhat passive part in this activity). We can visualize the farmer and
the

(83) duckling and we have also no difficulty in constructing an image of
the killing. In other words, the elements farmer, kill, and duckling define
concepts of a concrete order.

But a more careful linguistic analysis soon brings us to see that the two
subjects of discourse, however simply we may visualize them, are not
expressed quite as directly, as immediately, as we feel them. A "farmer"
is in one sense a perfectly unified concept, in another he is "one
who farms." The concept conveyed by the radical element (farm-) is not one
of personality at all but of an industrial activity (to farm), itself based
on the concept of a particular type of object (a farm). Similarly, the
concept of duckling is at one remove from that which is expressed by the
radical element of the word, duck. This element, which may occur as an
independent word, refers to a whole class of animals, big and little, while
duckling is limited in its application to the young of that class. The word
farmer has an "agentive" suffix -er that performs the function of
indicating the one that car ries out a given activity, in this case that of
farming. It transforms the verb to farm into an agentive noun precisely as
it transforms the verbs to sing, to paint, to teach into the corresponding
agentive nouns singer, fainter, teacher. The element -Wing is not so freely
used, but its significance is obvious. It adds to the basic concept the
notion of smallness (as also in gosling, fledgeling) or the somewhat
related notion of "contemptible" (as in weakling, princeling, hireling).
The agentive -er and the diminutive -ling both convey fairly concrete ideas
(roughly those of "doer" and "little"), but the concreteness is not
stressed. They do not so much define distinct concepts as mediate between
concepts. The -er of farmer does not quite say "one who (farms)"; it merely
indicates that the sort of person we call a "farmer" is closely enough
associated with activity on a farm to be conventionally

(84) thought of as always so occupied. He may, as a matter of fact, go to
town and engage in any pursuit but farming, yet his linguistic label
remains "farmer." Language here betrays a certain helplessness or, if one
prefers, a stubborn tendency to look away from the immediately suggested
function, trusting to the imagination and to usage to fill in the
transitions of thought and the details of application that distinguish one
concrete concept (to farm) from another "derived" one (farmer). It would be
impossible for any language to express every concrete idea by an
independent word or radical element. The concreteness of experience is
infinite, the resources of the richest language are strictly limited. It
must perforce throw countless concepts under the rubric of certain basic
ones, using other concrete or semi-concrete ideas as functional mediators.
The ideas expressed by these mediating elements-they may be independent
words, affixes, or modifications of the radical element-may be called
"derivational" or "qualifying." Some concrete concepts, such as kill, are
expressed radically; others, such as farmer and duckling, are expressed
derivatively. Corresponding to these two modes of expression we have two
types of concepts and of linguistic elements, radical (farm, kill, duck)
and derivational (-er, -ling). When a word (or unified group of words)
contains a derivational element (or word) the concrete significance of the
radical element (farm-, duck-) tends to fade from consciousness and to
yield to a new concreteness (farmer, duckling) that is synthetic in
expression rather than in thought. In our sentence the concepts of farm and
duck are not really involved at all; they are merely latent, for formal
reasons, in the linguistic expression.

Returning to this sentence, we feel that the analysis of farmer and
duckling is practically irrelevant to an understanding of its content and
entirely irrelevant to a feeling for the structure of the sentence as a

(85) whole. From the standpoint of the sentence the derivational elements -er and -ling are
merely details in the local economy of two of its terms
(farmer, duckling) that it accepts as units of expression. This
indifference of the sentence as such to some part of the analysis of its
words is shown by the fact that if we substitute such radical words as man
and chick for farmer and duckling, we obtain a new material content, it is
true, but not in the least a new structural mold. We can go further and
substitute another activity for that of "killing," say "taking." The new
sentence, the man takes the chick, is totally different from the first
sentence in what it conveys, not in how it conveys it. We feel
instinctively, without the slightest attempt at conscious analysis, that
the two sentences fit precisely the same pattern, that they are really the
same fundamental sentence, differing only in their material trappings. In
other words, they express identical relational concepts in an identical
manner. The manner is here threefold-the use of an inherently relational
word (the) in analogous positions, the analogous sequence (subject;
predicate, consisting of verb and object) of the concrete terms of the
sentence, and the use of the suffixed element -s in the verb.

Change any of these features of the sentence and it becomes modified,
slightly or seriously, in some purely relational, non-material regard. If
the is omitted (farmer kills duckling, man takes chick), the sentence
becomes impossible; it falls into n o recognized formal pattern and the two
subjects of discourse seem to hang incompletely in the void. We feel that
there is no relation established between either of them and what is already
in the minds of the speaker and his auditor. As soon as a the is put before
the two nouns, we feel relieved. We know that the farmer and duckling which
the sentence tells us about are the same farmer and duckling that we had
been talking about or hear-

(86) -ing about or thinking about some time before. If I meet a man who is
not looking at and knows nothing about the farmer in question, I am likely
to be stared at for my pains if I announce to him that "the farmer [what
farmer?] kills the duckling [didn't know he had any, whoever he is]." If
the fact nevertheless seems interesting enough to communicate, I should be
compelled to speak of "a farmer up my way" and of "a duckling of his."
These little words, the and a, have the important function of establishing
a definite or an indefinite reference.

If I omit the first the and also leave out the suffixed -s, I obtain an
entirely new set of relations. Farmer, kill the duckling implies that I am
now speaking to the farmer, not merely about him; further, that he is not
actually killing the bird, but is being ordered by me to do so. The
subjective relation of the first sentence has become a vocative one, one of
address, and the activity is conceived in terms of command, not of
statement. We conclude, therefore, that if the farmer is to be merely
talked about, the little the must go back into its place and the -s must
not be removed. The latter element clearly defines, or rather helps to
define, statement as contrasted with command. I find, moreover, that if I
wish to speak of several farmers, I cannot say the farmers kills the
duckling, but must say the farmers kill the duckling. Evidently -.r
involves the notion of singularity in the subject. If the noun is singular,
the verb must have a form to correspond; if the noun is plural, the verb
has another, corresponding form.[2] Comparison with such forms as I kill
and you kill shows, moreover, that the -s has exclusive reference to a
person other than the speaker or the one spoken to. We conclude, therefore,
that it connotes a personal relation as well as the notion of singularity.
And comparison with a sentence like the

(87) farmer killed the duckling indicates that there is implied in this
overburdened -s a distinct reference to present tithe. Statement as such
and personal reference may well be looked upon as inherently relational
concepts. Number is evidently felt (by those who speak English as involving
a necessary relation, otherwise there would be no reason to express the
concept twice, in the noun and in the verb. Time also is clearly felt as a
relational concept; if it were not, we should be allowed to say the farmer
killed-s to correspond to the farmer kill-s. Of the four concepts
inextricably interwoven in the -s suffix, all are felt as relational, two
necessarily so. The distinction between a truly relational concept and one
that is so felt and treated, though it need not be in the nature of things,
will receive further attention in a moment.

Finally, I can radically disturb the relational cut of the sentence by
changing the order of its elements if the positions of farmer and kills are
interchanged, the sentence reads kills the farmer the duckling, which is
most naturally interpreted as an unusual but not unintelligible mode of
asking the question, does the farmer kill the duckling? In this new
sentence the act is not conceived as necessarily taking place at all. It
may or it may not be happening, the implication being that the speaker
wishes to know the truth of the matter and that the person spoken to is
expected to give him the information. The interrogative sentence possesses
an entirely different "modality" from the declarative one and implies a
markedly different attitude of the speaker towards his companion. An even
more striking change in personal relations is effected if we interchange
the farmer and the duckling. The duckling kills the farmer involves
precisely the same subjects of discourse and the same type of activity as
our first sentence, but the rôles of these subjects of discourse are now
reversed. The duckling has turned, like the proverbial worm, or, to put it
in grammat-

(88) -ical terminology, what was "subject" is now "object," what was object
is now subject.

The following tabular statement analyzes the sentence from the point of
view of the concepts expressed in it and of the grammatical processes
employed for their expression.

1. Definiteness of reference to first subject of discourse: expressed by
first the, which has preposed position.
2. Definiteness of reference to second subject of discourse: expressed by
second the, which has preposed position

4. Subjectivity of farmer: expressed by position of farmer before kills;
and by suffixed -s

5. Objectivity of duckling: expressed by position of duckling after kills

Number:

6.Singularity of first subject of discourse: expressed by lack of plural
suffix in farmer; and by suffix -s in following verb

7. Singularity of second subject of discourse: expressed by lack of plural
suffix irk duckling

(89)

Time:

8. Present: expressed by lack of preterit suffix in verb; and by suffixed -s

In this short sentence of five words there are expressed, therefore,
thirteen distinct concepts, of which three are radical and concrete, two
derivational, and eight relational. Perhaps the most striking result of the
analysis is a renewed realization of the curious lack of accord in our
language between function and form. The method of suffixing is used both
for derivational and for relational elements; independent words or radical
elements express both concrete ideas (objects, activities, qualities) and
relational ideas (articles like the and a; words defining case relations,
like of, to, for, with, by; words defining local relations, like in, on,
at); the same relational concept may be expressed more than once (thus, the
singularity of farmer is both negatively expressed in the noun and
positively in the verb); and one element may convey a group of interwoven
concepts rather than one definite concept alone (thus the -s of kills
embodies no less than four logically independent relations).

Our analysis may seem a bit labored, but only because we are so accustomed
to our own well-worn grooves of expression that they have come to be felt
as inevitable. Yet destructive analysis of the familiar is the only method
of approach to an understanding of fundamentally different modes of
expression. When one has learned to feel what is fortuitous or illogical or
unbalanced in the structure of his own language, he is already well on the
way toward a sympathetic grasp of the expression of the various classes of
concepts in alien types of speech. Not everything that is "outlandish" is
intrinsically illogical or far-fetched. It is often precisely the familiar
that a wider perspective reveals as the curiously exceptional. From a
purely logical standpoint it is obvious that there is

(90) no inherent reason why the concepts expressed in our sentence should
have been singled out, treated, and grouped as they have been and not
otherwise. The sentence is the outgrowth of historical and of unreasoning
psychological forces rather than of a logical synthesis of elements that
have been clearly grasped in their individuality. This is the case, to a
greater or less degree, in all languages, though in the forms of many we
find a snore coherent, a more consistent, reflection than in our English
forms of that unconscious analysis into individual concepts which is never
entirely absent from speech, however it may be complicated with or overlaid
by the more irrational factors.

A cursory examination of other languages, near and far, would soon show
that some or all of the thirteen concepts that our sentence happens to
embody may not only be expressed in different form but that they may be
differently grouped among themselves; that some among them may be dispensed
with; and that other concepts, not considered worth expressing in English
idiom, may be treated as absolutely indispensable to the intelligible
rendering of the proposition. First as to a different method of handling
such concepts as we have found expressed in the English sentence. If we
turn to German, we find that in the equivalent sentence (Der Bauer tötet
das Entelein) the definiteness of reference expressed by the English the is
unavoidably coupled with three other concepts-number (both der and das are
explicitly singular), case (der is subjective; das is subjective or
objective, by elimination therefore objective), and gender, a new concept
of the relational order that is not in this case explicitly involved in
English (der is masculine, das is neuter). Indeed, the chief burden of the
expression of case, gender, and number is in the German sentence borne by
the particles of reference rather than by the words that express the
concrete concepts (Bauer, Entelein) to which these

(91) relational concepts ought logically to attach themselves. In the
sphere of concrete concepts too it is worth noting that the German splits
up the idea of "killing" into the basic concept of "dead" (tot) and the
derivational one of "causing to do (or be) so and so" (by the method of
vocalic change, töt-); the German töt-et (analytically tot-
+ vowel change + -et) "causes to be dead" is, approximately, the formal equivalent of
our dead-en-s, though the idiomatic application of this latter word is
different.[3]

Wandering still further afield, we may glance at the Yana method of
expression. Literally translated, the equivalent Yana sentence would read
something like "kill-s he farmer [4] he to (luck-ling,"' in which "he" and
"to" are rather awkward English renderings of a general third personal
pronoun (he, she, it, or they) and an objective particle which indicates
that the following noun is connected with the verb otherwise than as
subject. The suffixed element in "kill-s" corresponds to the English suffix
with the important exceptions that it makes no reference to the number of
the subject and that the statement is known to be true, that it is vouched
for by the speaker. Number is only indirectly expressed in the sentence in
so far as there is no specific verb suffix indicating plurality of the
subject nor specific plural elements in the two nouns. Had the statement
been made on another's authority, a totally different "tense-modal" suffix
would have had to be used. The pronouns of reference ("he") imply nothing
by themselves as to number, gender, or case. Gender, indeed, is completely
absent in Yana as a relational category.

The Yana sentence has already illustrated the point

(92) that certain of our supposedly essential concepts may be ignored; both
the Yana and the German sentence illustrate the further point that certain
concepts may need expression for which an English-speaking person, or
rather the English-speaking habit, finds no need whatever. One could go on
and give endless examples of such deviations from English form, but we
shall have to content ourselves with a few more indications. In the Chinese
sentence "Man kill duck," which may be looked upon as the practical
equivalent of "The man kills the duck," there is by no means present for
the Chinese consciousness that childish, halting, empty feeling which we
experience in the literal English translation. The three concrete concepts-two objects and
an action-are each directly expressed by a monosyllabic
word which is at the same time a radical element; the two relational
concepts-"subject" and "object"-are expressed solely by the position of the
concrete words before and after the word of action. And that is all.
Definiteness or indefiniteness of reference, number, personality as an
inherent aspect of the verb, tense, not to speak of gender-all these are
given no expression in the Chinese sentence, which, for all that, is a
perfectly adequate communication-provided, of course, there is that
context, that background of mutual understanding that is essential to the
complete intelligibility of all speech. Nor does this qualification impair
our argument, for in the English sentence too we leave unexpressed a large
number of ideas which are either taken for granted or which have been
developed or are about to be developed in the course of the conversation.
Nothing has been said, for example, in the English, German, Yana, or
Chinese sentence as to the place relations of the farmer, the duck, the
speaker, and the listener. Are the farmer and the duck both visible or is
one or the other invisible from the point of view of the speaker, and are
both placed within

(93) the horizon of the speaker, the listener, or of some ,indefinite point
of reference "off yonder"? In other words, to paraphrase awkwardly certain
latent "demonstrative" ideas, does this farmer (invisible to us but
standing behind a door not far away from me, you being seated yonder well
out of reach) kill that duckding (which belongs to you)? or does. that
farther (who lives in your neighborhood and whom we see over there) kill
that duckling (that belongs to him)? This type of demonstrative elaboration
is foreign to our way of thinking, but it would seem very natural, indeed
unavoidable, to a Kwakiutl Indian.

What, then, are the absolutely, essential concepts in speech, the concepts
that must be expressed if language is to be a satisfactory means of
communication? Clearly we must have, first of all, a large stock of basic
or radical concepts, the concrete wherewithal of speech. We must have
objects, actions, qualities to talk about, and these must have their
corresponding symbols in independent words or in radical elements. No
proposition, however abstract its intent, is humanly possible without a
tying on at one or more points to the concrete world of sense. In every
intelligible proposition at least two of these radical ideas must be
expressed, though in exceptional cases one or even both may be understood
from the context. And, secondly, such relational concepts must be expressed
as moor the concrete concepts to each other and construct a definite,
fundamental form of proposition. In this fundamental form there must be no
doubt as to the nature of the relations that obtain between the concrete
concepts. We must know what concrete concept is directly or indirectly
related to what other, and how. If we wish to talk of a thing and an
action, we must know if they are coordinately related to each other (e.g.,
"He is fond of wine and gambling"); or if the thing is conceived of as the
starting point, the "doer" of the action, or, as it is customary to say,
the

(94) "subject" of which the action is predicated; or if, on the contrary,
it is the end point, the "object" of the action. If I wish to communicate
an intelligible idea about a farmer, a duckling, and the act of killing, it
is not enough to state the linguistic symbols for these concrete ideas in
any order, higgledy-piggledy, trusting that the hearer may construct some
kind of a relational pattern out of the general probabilities of the case.
The fundamental syntactic relations must be unambiguously expressed. I can
afford to be silent on the subject of time and place and number and of a
host of other possible types of concepts, but I can find no way of dodging
the issue as to who is doing the killing. There is no known language that
can or does dodge it, any more than it succeeds in saying something without
the use of symbols for the concrete concepts.

We are thus once more reminded of the distinction between essential or
unavoidable relational concepts and the dispensable type. The former are
universally expressed, the latter are but sparsely developed in some
languages, elaborated with a bewildering exuberance in others. But what
prevents us from throwing in these "dispensable" or "secondary" relational
concepts with the large, floating group of derivational, qualifying
concepts that we have already discussed? Is there, after all is said and
done, a fundamental difference between a qualifying concept like the nega.
tive in unhealthy and a relational one like the number concept in books? If
unhealthy may be roughly paraphrased as not healthy, may not books be just
as legitimately paraphrased, barring the violence to English idiom, as
several book? There are, indeed, languages in which the plural, if
expressed at all, is conceived of in the same sober, restricted, one might
almost say casual, spirit in which we feel the negative in unhealthy. For
such languages the number concept has no syntactic significance whatever,
is not essen-

(95) -tially conceived of as defining a relation, but falls into the group
of derivational or even of basic concepts. In English, however, as in
French, German, Latin, Greek -indeed in all the languages that we have most
familiarity with-the idea of number is not merely appended to a given
concept of a thing. It may have something of this merely qualifying value,
but its force extends far beyond. It infects much else in the sentence,
molding other concepts, e-en such as have no intelligible relation to
number, into forms that are said to correspond to or "agree with" the basic
concept to which it is attached in the first instance. If "a man falls" but
"men fall" in English, it is not because of any inherent change that has
taken place in the nature of the action or because the idea of plurality
inherent in "men" must, in the very nature of ideas, relate itself also to
the action performed by these men. What we are doing in these sentences is
what most languages, in greater or less degree and in a hundred varying
ways, are in the habit of doing-throwing a bold bridge between the two
basically distinct types of concept, the concrete and the abstractly
relational, infecting the latter, as it were, with the color and grossness
of the former. By a certain violence of metaphor the material concept is
forced to do duty for (or intertwine itself with) the strictly relational.

The case is even more obvious if we take gender as our text. In the two
English phrases, "The white woman that comes" and "The white men that
come," we are not reminded that gender, as well as number, may be elevated
into a secondary relational concept. It would seem a little far-fetched to
make of masculinity and femininity, crassly material, philosophically
accidental concepts that they are, a means of relating quality and person,
person and .action, nor would it easily occur to us, if we had not studied
the classics, that it was anything but absurd to inject into two such
highly attenuated relational concepts as are ex-

(96) -pressed by "the" and "that" the combined notions of number and sex.
Yet all this, and more, happens in Latin. Illa alba femina quae venit and
illi albi homines qui veniunt, conceptually translated, amount to this:
that-one-feminine-doer[5] one-feminine-white-doer feminine-doing-one-woman
which-one-feminine-doer other[6] -one-now-come; and: that-several-masculine-doer
several-masculine-white-doer masculine-doing-several-men
which-several-masculine-doer other-several-now-come. Each word involves no
less than four concepts, a radical concept (either properly concrete-while,
man, woman, come-or demonstrative-that, which) and three relational
concepts, selected front the categories of case, number, gender, person,
and tense. Logically, only case[7] (the relation of woman or men to a
following verb, of which to its antecedent, of that and white to woman or
men, and of which to come) imperatively demands expression, and that onlv
in connection with the concepts directly affected (there is, for instance,
no need to be informed that the whiteness is a doing or doer's whiteness
[8]). The other rela-

(97) -tional concepts are either merely parasitic (gender throughout;
number in the demonstrative, the adjective, the relative, and the verb) or
irrelevant to the essential syntactic form of the sentence (number in the
noun; person; tense). An intelligent and sensitive Chinaman, accustomed as
he is to cut to the very bone of linguistic form, might well say of the
Latin sentence, "How pedantically imaginative(" It must be difficult for
him, when first confronted by the illogical complexities of our European
languages, to feel at home in an attitude that so largely confounds the
subject-matter of speech with its formal pattern or, to be more accurate,
that turns. certain fundamentally concrete concepts to such a.ttenuated
relational uses.

I have exaggerated somewhat the concreteness of our subsidiary or rather
non-syntactical relational concepts in order that the essential facts might
come out in bold relief. It goes without saying that a Frenchman has no
clear sex notion in his mind when he speaks of un arbre ("a-masculine
tree") or of une pomme ("a-feminine apple"). Nor have we, despite the
grammarians, a very vivid sense of the present as contrasted with all past
and all future time when we say He comes .9 This is evident from o-ur use
of the present to indicate both future time ("Be comes to-morrow") and
general activity unspecified as to time ("Whenever he comes, I am glad to
see trim," where "comes" refers to past occurrences and possible future
ones rather than to present activity). In both the French and English
instances the primary ideas of sex and time have become diluted by form-analogy and
by extensions into the relational sphere, the concepts
ostensibly indicated being now so vaguely delimited

(98) that it is rather the tyranny of usage than the need of their concrete
expression that sways us in the selection of this or that form. If the
thinning-out process continues long enough, we may eventually be left with
a system of forms on out hands from which all the color of life has
vanished and which merely persist by inertia, duplicating each other's
secondary, syntactic functions with endless prodigality. Hence, in part,
the complex conjugational systems of so many languages, in which
differences of form are attended by no assignable differences of function.
There must have been a time, for instance, though it antedates our earliest
documentary evidence, when the type of tense formation represented by drove
or sank differed in meaning, in however slightly nuanced a degree, from the
type (killed, worked) which has now become established in English as the
prevailing preterit formation, very much as we recognize a valuable
distinction at present between both these types and the "perfect" (has
driven, has killed) but may have ceased to do so at some point in the
future.[10] Now form lives longer than its own conceptual content. Both are
ceaselessly changing, but, on the whole, the form tends to linger on when
the spirit has flown or changed its being. Irrational form, form for form's
sake-however roe term this tendency to hold on to formal distinctions once
they have come to be-is as natural to the life of language as is the
retention of modes of conduct that have long outlived the meaning they once
had.

There is another powerful tendency which makes for a formal elaboration
that does not strictly correspond to clear-cut conceptual differences. This
is the tendency to construct schemes of classification into which all the
concepts of language must be fitted.

(99) Once we have made up our minds that all things are either definitely
good or bad or definitely black or white, it is difficult to get into the
frame of mind that recognizes that any particular thing may be both good
and bad (in other words, indifferent) or both black and white (in other
words, gray), still more difficult to realize that the good-bad or black-white categories may not apply at all. Language is in many respects as
unreasonable and stubborn about its classifications as is such a mind. 1t
must have its perfectly exclusive pigeon-holes and will tolerate n o flying
vagrants. Any concept that asks for expression must submit to the
classificatory rules of the game, just as there are statistical surveys in
which even the most convinced atheist must perforce be labeled Catholic,
Protestant, or Jew or get no hearing. In English we have made up our minds
that all action must be conceived of in reference to three standard times.
If, therefore, we desire to state a proposition that is as true to-morrow
as it was yesterday, we have to pretend that the present moment may be
elongated fore and aft so as to take in all eternity.[11] In French we know
once for all that an object is masculine or feminine, whether it be living
or not; just as in many American and East Asiatic languages it must be
understood to belong to a certain form-category (say, ring-round, ball-round, long and
slender, cylindrical, sheet-like, in mass like sugar)
before it can be enumerated (e.g., "two ball-class potatoes," "three sheet-class carpets")
or even said to "be" or "be handled in a definite way"
(thus, in the Athabaskan languages and in Yana, "to carry" or "throw" a
pebble is quite another thing than to carry or throw a log, linguistically
no less than in terms of muscular experience). Such instances might be
multi-

100) -plied at will. It is almost as though at some period in the past the
unconscious mind of the race had made a hasty inventory of experience,
committed itself to a premature classification that allowed of no revision,
and saddled the inheritors of its language with a science that they no
longer quite believed in nor had the strength to overthrow. Dogma, rigidly
prescribed by tradition, stiffens into formalism. Linguistic categories
make up a system of surviving dogma-dogma of the unconscious. They are
often but half real as concepts; their life tends ever to languish away
into form for form's sake.

There is still a third cause for the rise of this nonsignificant form, or
rather of non-significant differences of form. This is the mechanical
operation of phonetic processes, which may bring about formal distinctions
that have not and never had a corresponding functional distinction. Much of
the irregularity and general formal complexity of our declensional and
conjugational systems is due to this process. The plural of hat is hats,
the plural of self is selves. In the former case we have a true -s
symbolizing plurality, in the latter a z-sound coupled with a change in the
radical element of the word of f to v. Here we have not a falling together
of forms that originally stood for fairly distinct concepts-as we saw was
presumably the case with such parallel forms as drove and worked -but a
merely mechanical manifolding of the same formal element without a
corresponding growth of a new concept. This type of form development,
therefore, while of the greatest interest for the general history of
language, does not directly concern us now in our effort to understand the
nature of grammatical concepts and their tendency to degenerate into purely
formal counters.

We may now conveniently revise our first classification of concepts as
expressed in language and suggest the following scheme:

II. Derivational Concepts (less concrete, as a rule, than I, more so than
III) : normally expressed by affixing non-radical elements to radical
elements or by inner modification of these; differ from type I in defining
ideas that are irrelevant to the proposition as a whole but that give a
radical element a particular increment of significance and that are thus
inherently related in a specific way to concepts of type I[13]

III. Concrete Relational Concepts (still more abstract, yet not entirely
devoid of a measure of concreteness) normally expressed by affixing non-radical elements
to radical elements, but generally at a greater remove
from these than is the case with elements of type II, or by inner
modification of radical elements; differ fundamentally from type II in
indicating or implying relations that transcend the particular word to
which they are immediately attached, thus leading over to

IV. Pure Relational Concepts (purely abstract): normally expressed by
affixing non-radical elements to radical elements (in which case these
concepts are frequently intertwined with those of type 111) or by their
inner modification, by independent words, or by position; serve to relate
the concrete elements of the proposition to each other, thus giving it
definite syntactic form.

(102) The nature of these four classes of concepts as regards their
concreteness or their power to express syntactic relations may be thus
symbolized:

Material Content

I. Basic Concepts

II. Derivational Concepts

Relation

III. Concrete Relational Concepts

IV. Pure Relational Concepts

These schemes must not be worshipped as fetiches. In the actual work of
analysis difficult problems frequently arise and we may well be in doubt as
to how to group a given set of concepts. This is particularly apt to be the
case in exotic languages, where we may be quite sure of the analysis of the
words in a sentence and yet not succeed in acquiring that inner "feel" of
its structure that enables us to tell infallibly what is "material content"
and what is "relation." Concepts of class I are essential to all speech,
also concepts of class IV. Concepts II and III are both common, but not
essential; particularly group III, which represents, in effect, a
psychological and formal confusion of types II and IV or of types I and IV,
is an avoidable class of concepts. Logically there is an impassable gulf
between I and IV, but the illogical, metaphorical genius of speech has
wilfully spanned the gulf and set up a continuous gamut of concepts and
forms that leads imperceptibly from the crudest of materialities ("house"
or "John Smith") to the most subtle of relations. It is particularly
significant that the unanalyzable independent word belongs in most cases to
either group I or group IV, rather less commonly to II or III. It is
possible for a concrete concept, represented by a simple word, to lose its
material significance entirely and pass over directly into the relational
sphere without at the same time losing its independence as a word. This
happens, for instance, in Chinese and Cambodgian when the verb "give" is
used in an abstract sense as a mere symbol of the "indirect objective"
relation (e.g., Cambodgian "We make

(103) story this give all that person who have child," i.e., "We have made
this story for all those that have children").

There are, of course, also not a few instances of transitions between
groups I and II and I and III, as well as of the less radical one between
II and III. To the first of these transitions belongs that whole class of
examples in which the independent word, after passing through the
preliminary stage of functioning as the secondary or qualifying element in
a compound, ends up by being a derivational affix pure and simple, yet
without losing the memory of its former independence. Such an element and
concept is the full of teaspoonful, which hovers psychologically between
the status of an independent, radical concept (compare full) or of a
subsidiary element in a compound (cf. brim-full) and that of a simple
suffix (cf. dutiful) in which the primary concreteness is no longer felt.
In general, the more highly synthetic our linguistic type, the more
difficult and even arbitrary it becomes to distinguish groups I and II.

Not only is there a gradual loss of the concrete as we pass through from
group I to group IV, there is also a constant fading away of the feeling of
sensible reality within the main groups of linguistic concepts themselves.
In many languages it becomes almost imperative, therefore, to make various
sub-classifications, to segregate, for instance, the more concrete from the
more abstract concepts of group II. Yet we must always beware of reading
into such abstracter groups that purely formal, relational feeling that we
can hardly help associating with certain of the abstracter concepts which,
with us, fall in group III, unless, indeed, there is clear evidence to
warrant such a reading in. An example or two should make clear these all-important distinctions.[14] In Nootka we have an

(104) unusually large number of derivational affixes (expressing concepts
of group II). Some of these are quite material in content (e.g., "in the
house," "to dream of"), others, like an element denoting plurality and a
diminutive affix, are far more abstract in content. The former type are
more closely welded with the radical element than the latter, which can
only be suffixed to formations that have the value of complete words. If,
therefore, I wish to say "the small fires in the house" -and I can do this
in one word--I must form the word "fire-in-the-house," to which elements
corresponding to "small," our plural, and "the" are appended. The element
indicating the definiteness of reference that is implied in our "the" comes
at the very end of the word. So far, so good. "Fire-in-the-house-the" is an
intelligible correlate of our "the house-fire." [15] But is the Nootka
correlate of "the small fires in the house" the true equivalent of an
English "the house-firelets"[16] By no means. First of all, the plural
element precedes the diminutive in Nootka: "fire-in-the-house-plural-small-the," in other words "the house-fireslet," which at once reveals the
important fact that the plural concept is not as abstractly, as
relationally, felt as in English. A more adequate rendering would be "the
house-fire-several-let," in which, however, "several" is too gross a word,
"-let" too choice an element ("small" again is too gross). In truth we
cannot carry over into English the inherent feeling of the Nootka word,
which seems to hover somewhere between "the house-firelets" and "the

105) "house-fire-several-small." But what more than anything else cuts off
all possibility of comparison between the English -s of "house-firelets"
and the "-several-small" of the Nootka word is this, that in Nootka neither
the plural nor the diminutive affix corresponds or refers to anything else
in the sentence. In English "the house-firelets burn" (not "burns"), in
Nootka neither verb, nor adjective, nor anything else in the proposition is
in the least concerned with the plurality or the diminutiveness of the
fire. Hence, while Nootka recognizes a cleavage between concrete and less
concrete concepts within group II, the less concrete do not transcend the
group and lead us into that abstracter air into which our plural -s carries
us. But at any rate, the reader may object, it is something that the Nootka
plural affix is set apart from the concreter group of affixes; and may not
the Nootka diminutive have a slenderer, a more elusive content than our -let or -ling or the German -chen or -lein? [17]

Can such a concept as that of plurality ever be classified with the more
material concepts of group II? Indeed it can be. In Yana the third person
of the verb makes no formal distinction between singular and plural.
Nevertheless the plural concept can be, and nearly always is, expressed by
the suffixing of an element (-ba-) to the radical element of the verb. "It
burns in the east" is rendered by the verb is "burn-east-s."[18] "They burn
in the east" is yca-ba-hau-si. Note that the plural affix immediately
follows the radical element (us-), disconnecting it from the local element
(-hate-). It needs no labored argument

(106) to prove that the concept of plurality is here hardly less concrete
than that of location "in the east," and that the Yana form corresponds in
feeling not so much to our "They burn in the east" (ardunt oriente) as to a
"Burn-several-east-s, it plurally burns in the east," an expression which
we cannot adequately assimilate for lack of the necessary form-grooves into
which to run it.

But can we go a step farther and dispose of the category of plurality as an
utterly material idea, one that would make of "books" a "plural book," in
which the "plural," like the "white" of "white book," falls contentedly
into group I? Our "many books" and "several books" are obviously not cases
in point. Even if we could say "many book" and "several book" (as we can
say "many a book" and "each book"), the plural concept would still not
emerge as clearly as it should for our argument; "many" and "several" are
contaminated by certain notions of quantity or scale that are not essential
to the idea of plurality itself. N% e must turn to central and eastern Asia
for the type of expression we are seeking. In Tibetan, for instance, nga-s
mi mthong [19]"I-by man see, by me a man is seen, I see a man" may just as
well be understood to mean "I see men," if there happens to be no reason to
emphasize the fact of plurality.[20] If the fact is worth expressing,
however, I can say nga-s mi rnams mthong "by me man plural see," where
rnams is the perfect conceptual analogue of -s in books, divested of all
relational strings. Rnams follows its noun as would ;my other attributive
word-"man plural" (whether two or a million) like "man white." No need to
bother about his plurality any more than about his whiteness unless we
insist on the point.

What is true of the idea of plurality is naturally

(107) just as true of a great many other concepts. They do not necessarily
belong where we who speak English are in the habit of putting them.. They
may be shifted towards I or towards IV, the two poles of linguistic
expression. Nor dare we look down on the Nootka Indian and the Tibetan for
their material attitude towards a concept which to us is abstract and
relational, lest we invite the reproaches of the Frenchman who feels a
subtlety of relation in femme blanche and homme blanc that he misses in the
coarser-grained white woman and white man. But the Bantu Negro, were he a
philosopher, might go further and find it strange that we put in group II a
category, the diminutive, which he strongly feels to belong to group III
and which he uses, along with a number of other classificatory
concepts,[21] to relate hiss subjects and objects, attributes and
predicates, as a Russian or a German handles his genders and, if possible,
with an even greater finesse.

It is because our conceptual scheme is a sliding scale rather than a
philosophical analysis of experience that we cannot say in advance just
where to put a given concept. We must dispense, in other words, with a
well-ordered classification of categories. What boots it to put tense and
mode here o r number there when the next language one handles puts tense a
peg "lower down" (towards I), mode and number a peg "higher up" (towards
IV)? Nor is there much to be gained in a summary work of this kind from a
general inventory of the types of concepts generally found in groups 11,
III, and IV. There are too, many possibilities. It would be interesting to
show what are the most typical noun-forming and verb-forming elements of
group II; how variously nouns may be classified (by gender; personal and
non-personal; animate and inanimate; by form; common and proper); how the
concept of

(108) number is elaborated (singular and plural; singular, dual, and
plural; singular, dual, trial, and plural; single, distributive, and
collective); what tense distinctions may be made in verb or noun (the
"past," for instance, may be an indefinite past, immediate, remote,
mythical, completed, prior); how delicately certain languages have
developed the idea of "aspect" [22] (momentaneous, durative, continuative,
inceptive, cessative, durative-inceptive, iterative, momentaneous-iterative, durative-iterative, resultative, and still others); what
modalities may be recognized (indicative, imperative, potential,
dubitative, optative, negative, and a host of others [23]); what
distinctions of person are possible (is "we," for instance, conceived of as
a plurality of "I" or is it as distinct from "I" as either is from "you" or
"he"?-both attitudes are illustrated in language; moreover, does "we"
include you to whom I speak or not?-"inclusive" and "exclusive" forms);
what may be the general scheme of orientation, the so-called demonstrative
categories ("this" and "that" in an endless procession of nuances);[24] how
frequently the form expresses the source or nature of the speaker's
knowledge (known by actual experience,

109) by hearsay,[25] by inference); how the syntactic relations may be
expressed in the noun ;subjective and objective; agentive, instrumental,
and person affected;[26] various types of "genitive" and indirect
relations) and, correspondingly, in the verb (actives and passive; active
and static; transitive and intransirive; impersonal, reflexive, reciprocal,
indefinite as to object, and many other special limitations on the
starting-point and end-point of the flow of activity). These details,
important as many of them are to an understanding of the "inner form" of
language, yield in general significance to the more radical group-distinctions that we have set up. It is enough for the general reader to
feel that language struggles towards two poles of linguistic expression-material content and relationand that these poles tend to be connected by a
long series of transitional concepts.

In dealing with words and their varying forms we have had to anticipate
much that concerns the sentence as a whole. Every language has its special
method or methods of binding words into a larger unity. The importance of
these methods is apt to vary with the complexity of the individual word.
The

(110) more synthetic the language, in other words, the more clearly the
status of each word in the sentence is indicated by its own resources, the
less need is there for looking beyond the word to the sentence as a whole.
The Latin alit "(he) acts" needs no outside help to establish its place in
a proposition. Whether I say agit dominus "the master acts" or sic femina
agit "thus the woman acts," the net result as to the syntactic feel of the
agit is practically the same. It can only be a verb, the predicate of a
proposition, and it can only be conceived as a statement of activity
carried out by a person (or thing) other than you or me. It is not so with
such a word as the English act. Act is a syntactic waif until we have
defined its status in a proposition-one thing in "they act abominably,"
quite another in "that was a kindly act." The Latin sentence speaks with
the assurance of its individual members, the English word needs the
prompting of its fellows. Roughly speaking, to be sure. And yet to say that
a sufficiently elaborate word-structure compensates for external syntactic
methods is perilously close to begging the question. The elements of the
word are related to each other in a specific way and follow each other in a
rigorously determined sequence. This is tantamount to saying that a word
which consists of more than a radical element is a crystallization of a
sentence or of some portion of a sentence, that a form like agit is roughly
the psychological[27] equivalent of a form like age is "act he." Breaking
down, then, the wall that separates word and sentence, we may ask: What, at
last analysis, are the fundamental methods of relating word to word and
element to element, in short, of passing from the isolated notions
symbolized by each word and by each element to the unified proposition that
corresponds to a thought?

The answer is simple and is implied in the preceding remarks. The most
fundamental and the most

111) powerful of all relating methods is the method of order. Let us think
of some more or less concrete idea, say a color, and set down its symbol-red; of another concrete idea, say a person or object, setting down its
symbol-dog; finally, of a third concrete idea, say an action, setting down
its symbol-run. It is hardly possible to set down these three :symbols-red
dog run -without relating them in some way, for example (the) red dog
run(s). I am far from wishing to state that the proposition has always
:grown up in this analytic manner, merely that the very process of
juxtaposing concept to concept, symbol to symbol, forces some kind of
relational "feeling," if nothing else, upon us. To certain syntactic
adhesions we are very sensitive, for example, to the attributive relation
of quality (red dog) or the subjective relation (dog run) or the objective
relation (kill dog), to others we are more indifferent, for example, to the
attributive relation of circumstance (to-day red dog run or red dog to-day
run or red dog run to-day, all of which are equivalent propositions or
propositions in embryo). Words and elements, then, once they are listed in
a certain order, tend not only to establish some kind of relation among
themselves but are attracted to each other in greater or in less degree. It
is presumably this very greater or less that ultimately leads to those
firmly solidified groups of elements (radical element or elements plus one
or more grammatical elements) that we have studied as complex words. They
are in all likelihood nothing but sequences that have shrunk together and
away from other sequences or isolated elements in the flow of speech. While
they are fully alive, in other words, while they are functional at every
point, they can keep themselves at a psychological distance from their
neighbors. As they gradually lose much of their life, they fall back into
the embrace of the sentence as a whole and the sequence of independent
words regains the importance it had in part

112) transferred to the crystallized groups of elements. Speech is thus
constantly tightening and loosening its sequences. In its highly integrated
forms (Latin, Eskimo) the "energy" of sequence is largely locked up in
complex word formations, it becomes transformed into a kind of potential
energy that may not be released for millennia. In its more analytic forms
(Chinese, English) this energy is mobile, ready to hand for such service as
we demand of it.

There can be little doubt that stress has frequently played a controlling
influence in the formation of element-groups or complex words out of
certain sequences in the sentence. Such an English word as withstand is
merely an old sequence with stand, i.e., "against[28] stand," in which the
unstressed adverb was permanently drawn to the following verb and lost its
independence as a significant element. In the same way French futures of
the type irai "(I) shall go" are but the resultants of a coalescence of
originally independent words: ir [29]a'i "to-go I-have," under the
influence of a unifying accent. But stress has done more than articulate or
unify sequences that in their own right imply a syntactic relation. Stress
is the most natural means at our disposal to emphasize a linguistic
contrast, to indicate the major element in a sequence. Hence we need not be
surprised to find that accent too, no less than sequence, may serve as the
unaided symbol of certain relations. Such a contrast as that of go' between
("one who goes between") and to go between' may be of quite secondary
origin in English, but there is every reason to believe that analogous
distinctions have prevailed at all times in linguistic history. A sequence
like see' man might imply some type of relation in which see qualifies the
following

(113) word, hence "a seeing man" or "a seen (or visible) man," or is its
predication, hence "the man sees" or "the man is seen," while a sequence
like see man' might indicate that the accented word in some way limits the
application of the first., say as direct object, hence "to see a man" or
"(he) sells the man." Such alterations of relation, as symbolized by
varying stresses, are important and frequent in a number of languages.[30]

It is somewhat venturesome and yet not an altogether unreasonable
speculation that sees in word order and stress the primary methods for the
expression of all syntactic relations and looks upon the present relational
value of specific words and elements as but a secondary condition due to a
transfer of values. Thus, we may surmise that the Latin -m of words like
feminam, dominum, and civem did not originally"[31] denote that "woman,"
"master,"' and "citizen" were objectively related to the verb of the
proposition but indicated something far more concrete,[32] that the
objective relation was merely implied by the position or accent of the word
(radical element) immediately preceding the -m, and that gradually, as its
more concrete significance faded away, it took .over a syntactic function
that did not originally belong to it. This sort of evolution by transfer is
traceable in many instances. Thus, the o f in an English phrase like "the
law of the land" is now as colorless in conttent, as purely a relational
indicator as the "gentive" suffix -is in the Latin lex urbis "the law of
the city." We know, however, that it was originally an adverb of
considerable concreteness of meaning,[33] "awav, moving from," and that the
syntactic relation was originally expressed by

(114) the case form [34] of the second noun. As the case form lost its
vitality, the adverb took over its function. If we are actually justified
in assuming that the expression of all syntactic relations is ultimately
traceable to these two unavoidable, dynamic features of speech--sequence
and stress[35]--an interesting thesis results: -All of the actual content of
speech, its clusters of vocalic and consonantal sounds, is in origin
limited to the concrete; relations were originally not expressed in outward
form but were merely implied and articulated with the help of order and
rhythm. In other words, relations were intuitively felt and could only
"leak out" with the help of dynamic factors that themselves move on an
intuitional plane.

There is a special method for the expression of relations that has been so
often evolved in the history of language that we must glance at it for a
moment. This is the method of "concord" or of like signaling. It is based
on the same principle as the password or label. All persons or objects that
answer to the same countersign or that bear the same imprint are thereby
stamped as somehow related. It makes little difference, once they are so
stamped, where they are to be found or how they behave themselves. They are
known to belong together. We are familiar with the principle of concord in
Latin and Greek. Many of us have been struck by such relentless rhymes as
vidi Mum bonum dominum "I saw that good master" or quarum dearum. saevarum
"of which stern goddesses." Not that sound-echo, whether in the form of
rhyme or of alliteration[36] is necessary to concord, though in its most
typical and original forms concord is nearly always accompanied by sound
repetition. The essence of the principle is simply this, that words
(elements) that

(115) belong together, particularly if they are syntactic equivalents or
are related in like fashion to another word or element, are outwardly
marked by the same or functionally equivalent affixes. The application of
the principle varies considerably according to the genius of the particular
language. In Latin and Greek, for instance, there is concord between noun
and qualifying word (adjective or demonstrative) as regards gender, number,
and case, between verb and subject only as regards number, and no concord
between verb and object.

In Chinook there is a more far-reaching concord between noun, whether
subject or object, and verb. Every noun is classified according to five
categories --masculine, feminine, neuter,[37] dual, and plural. "Woman" is
feminine, "sand" is neuter, "table" is masculine. If, therefore, I wish to
say "The woman put the sand on the table," I must place in the verb certain
class or gender prefixes that accord with corresponding noun prefixes. The
sentence reads then, "The (fem.)-woman she (fem.)-it (neut.)-it (masc.)-on-put the (neut.)-sand the (masc..)-table." If "sand" is qualified as "much"
and "table" as "large," these new ideas are expressed as abstract nouns,
each with its inherent class-prefix ("much" is neuter or feminine, "large"
is masculine) and with a possessive prefix referring to the qualified noun.
Adjective thus calls to noun, noun to verb. "The woman put much sand on the
large table," therefore, takes the form: "The (fem.)-woman she (fem.)-it
(neut.)-it (masc.)-on-put the (fem.)-thereof (neut.)-quantity the (neut.)-sand the (masc.)-thereof (masc.)-largeness the (masc.)-table." The
classification of "table" as masculine is thus three times insisted on-in
the noun, in the adjective, and

(116) in the verb. In the Bantu languages,[38] the principle of concord
works very much as in Chinook. In them also nouns are classified into a
number of categories and are brought into relation with adjectives,
demonstratives, relative pronouns, and verbs by means of prefixed elements
that call off the class and make up a complex system of concordances. In
such a sentence as "That fierce lion who came here is dead," the class of
"lion," which we may call the animal class, would be referred to by
concording prefixes no less than six times,-with the demonstrative
("that"), the qualifying adjective, the noun itself, the relative pronoun,
the subjective prefix to the verb of the relative clause, and the
subjective prefix to the verb of the main clause ("is dead"). We recognize
in this insistence on external clarity of reference the same spirit as
moves in the more familiar illum bonum dominum.

Psychologically the methods of sequence and accent lie at the opposite pole
to that of concord. Where they are all for implication, for subtlety of
feeling, concord is impatient of the least ambiguity but must have its
well-certificated tags at every turn. Concord tends to dispense with order.
In Latin and Chinook the independent words are free in position, less so in
Bantu. In both Chinook and Bantu, however, the methods of concord and order
are equally important for the differentiation of subject and object, as the
classifying verb prefixes refer to subject, object, or indirect object
according to the relative position they occupy. These examples again bring
home to us the significant fact that at some point or other order asserts
itself in every language as the most fundamental of relating principles.

The observant reader has probably been surprised

(117) that all this time we have had so little to say of the time-honored
"parts of speech." The reason for this is not far to seek. Our conventional
classification of words into parts of speech is only a vague, wavering
approximation to a consistently worked out inventory of experience. We
imagine, to begin with, that all "verbs" are inherently concerned with
action as such, that a "noun" is the name of some definite object or
personality that can be pictured by the mind, that all qualities are
necessarily expressed by a definite group of words to which we may
appropriately apply the term "adjective." As soon as we test our
vocabulary, we discover that the parts of speech are far from corresponding
to so simple an analysis of reality. We say "it is red" and define "red" as
a quality-word or adjective. We should consider it strange to think of an
equivalent of "is red" in which the whole predication (adjective and verb
of being) is conceived of as a verb in precisely the same way in which we
think of "extends" or "lies" or "sleeps" as a verb. Yet as soon as we give
the "durative" notion of being red an inceptive or transitional turn, we
can avoid the parallel form "it becomes red, it turns reed" and say "it
reddens." No one denies that "reddens" is as good a verb as "sleeps" or
even "walks." Yet "'it is red" is related to "it reddens" very much as is
"he stands" to "he stands up" or "he rises." It is merely a matter of
English or of general Indo-European idiom that we cannot say "it reds" in
the sense of "it is red." There are hundreds of languages that can.. Indeed
there are many that can express what we should call an adjective only by
making a participle out of a verb. "Red" in such languages is merely a
derivative "being red," as our "sleeping" or "walking" are derivatives of
primary verbs.

Just as we can verbify the idea of a quality in such cases as "reddens," so
we can represent a quality or t an action to ourselves as a thing. We speak
of "the

(118) height of a building" or "the fall of an apple" quite as though these
ideas were parallel to "the roof of a building" or "the skin of an apple,"
forgetting that the nouns (height, fall) have not ceased to indicate a
quality and an act when we have made them speak with the accent of mere
objects. And just as there are languages that make verbs of the great mass
of adjectives, so there are others that make nouns of them. In Chinook, as
we have seen, "the big table" is "the-table its-bigness"; in Tibetan the
same idea may be expressed by "the table of bigness," very much as we may
say "a man of wealth" instead of "a rich man."

But are there not certain ideas that it is impossible to render except by
way of such and such parts of speech? What can be done with the "to" of "he
came to the house"? Well, we can say "he reached the house" and dodge the
preposition altogether, giving the verb a nuance that absorbs the idea of
local relation carried by the "to." But let us insist on giving
independence to this idea of local relation. Must we not then hold to the
preposition? No, we can make a noun of it. We can say something like "he
reached the proximity of the house" or "he reached the houselocality."
Instead of saying "he looked into the glass" we may say "he scrutinized the
glass-interior." Such expressions are stilted in English because they do
not easily fit into our formal grooves, but in language after language we
find that local relations are expressed in just this way. The local
relation is nominalized. And so we might go on examining the various parts
of speech and showing how they not merely grade into each other but are to
an astonishing degree actually convertible into each other. The upshot of
such an examination would be to feel convinced that the "part of speech"
reflects not so much our intuitive analysis of reality as our ability to
compose that reality into a variety of formal patterns. A part of speech
outside of the limitations of syntactic form is but a

(119) will o' the wisp. For this reason no logical scheme of the parts of
speech --their number, nature, and necessary confines- is of the slightest
interest to the linguist. Each language has its own scheme. Everything
depends on the formal demarcations which it recognizes.

Yet we must not he too destructive. It is well to remember that speech
consists of a series of propositions. There must be something to talk about
and something must be said about this subject of (discourse once it is
selected. This distinction is of such fundamental importance that the vast
majority of languages have emphasized it by creating some sort of formal
barrier between the two terms of the proposition. The subject of discourse
is a noun. As the most common subject of discourse is either a person or a
thing, the noun clusters about concrete concepts of that order. As the
thing predicated of a subject is generally an activity in the widest sense
of the word, at passage from one moment of existence to another, the form
which has been set aside for the business of predicating, in other words,
the verb, clusters about concepts of activity. No language wholly fails to
distinguish noun and verb, though in particular cases the nature of the
distinction may be an elusive one. It is different with the other parts of
speech. Not one of them is imperatively required for the life of
language.[39]

Notes

Not in its technical sense.

It is, of course, an "accident" that -s denotes plurality in the noun,
singularity in the verb.

"To cause to be dead" or "to cause to die" in the sense of "to kill" is
an exceedingly wide-spread usage. It is found, for instance, also in Nootka
and Sioux.

Agriculture was not practised by the Yana. The verbal idea of "to farm"
would probably be expressed in some such synthetic manner as "to dig-earth"
or "to- grow-cause." These are suffixed elements corresponding to -er and -ling.

:Doer." not "done to." This is a necessarily clumsy tag to represent the
"nominative" (subjective) in contrast to the "accusative" (objective).

I.e., not you or I.

By "case" is here meant not only the subjective-objective relation but
also that of attribution.

Except in so far as Latin uses this method as a rather awkward,
roundabout method of establishing the attribution of the color to the
particular object or person. In effect one cannot in Latin directly say
that a person is white, merely that what is white is identical with the
person who is, acts, or is acted upon in such and such a manner. In origin
the feel of the Latin ilia alba femina is really "that-one, the-white-one,
(namely) the-woman"-three substantive ideas that are related to each other
by a juxtaposition intended to convey an identity. English and Chinese
express the attribution directly by means of order. In Latin the ilia and
alba may occupy almost any position in the sentence. It is important to
observe that the subjective form of ilia and alba does not truly define a
relation of these qualifying concepts to femina. Such a relation might be
formally expressed via an attributive case, say the genitive (woman of
whiteness). In Tibetan both the methods of order and of true case relation
may be employed: woman white (i.e., "white woman") or white-of woman (i.e.,
"won-tan of whiteness, woman who is white, white woman").

Aside, naturally, from the life and imminence that may be created for
such a sentence by a particular context.

This has largely happened in popular French and German, where the
difference is stylistic rather than functional. The preterits are more
literary or formal in tone than the perfects.

Hence, "the square root of 4 is 2," precisely as "my uncle is here now."
There are many "primitive" languages that are more philosophical and
distinguish between a true "present" and a "customary" or "general" tense.

"Except, of course, the fundamental selection and contrast necessarily
implied in defining one concept as against another. "Man" and "white"
possess an inherent relation to "woman" and "black," but it is a relation
of conceptual content only and is of no direct interest to grammar.

"Thus, the -er of farmer may be defined as indicating that particular
substantive concept (object or thing) that serves as the habitual subject
of the particular verb to which it is affixed. This relation of "subject"
(a farmer farms) is inherent in and specific to the word; it does not exist
for the sentence as a whole. In the same way the -ling of duckling defines
a specific relation of attribution that concerns only the radical element,
not the sentence.

It is precisely the failure to feel the "value" or "tone," as distinct
from the outer significance, of the concept expressed by a given
grammatical element that has so often led students to misunderstand the
nature of languages profoundly alien to their own. Not everything that
calls itself "tense" or "mode" or "number" or "gender" or "person" is
genuinely comparable to what we mean by these terms in Latin or French.

Suffixed articles occur also in Danish and Swedish and in numerous other
languages. The Nootka element for "in the house" differs from our "house-"
in that it is suffixed and can not occur as an independent word; nor is it
related to the Nootka word for "house."

Assuming the existence of a word "firelet."

The Nootka diminutive is doubtless more of a feeling-element, an element
of nuance, than our -ling. This is shown by the fact that it may be used
with verbs: as well as with nouns. In speaking to a child, one is likely to
add the diminutive to any word in the sentence, regardless of whether there
is an inherent diminutive meaning in the word or not.

-si is the third person of the present tense. -hau- "east" is an affix,
not a compounded radical element.

These are classical, not modern colloquial, forms.

Just as in English "He has written books" makes no commitment on the
score of quantity ("a few, several, many").

A term borrowed from Slavic grammar. It indicates the lapse of action
its nature from the standpoint of continuity. Our "cry" is indefinite as to
aspect, "be crying" is durative, "cry out" is momentaneous, "burst into
tears" is inceptive, "keep crying" is continuative, "start in crying" is
durative-inceptive, "cry now and again" is iterative, "cry out every now
and then" or cry in fits and starts" is momentaneous-iterative. "To put on
a coat" is momentaneous, "to wear a coat" is resultative. As our examples
show, aspect is expressed in English by all kinds of idiomatic turns rather
than by a consistently worked out set of grammatical forms. In many
languages aspect is of far greater formal significance than tense, with
which the naďve student is apt to confuse it.

By "modalities" I do not mean the matter of fact statement, say, of
negation or uncertainty as such, rather their implication in terms of form.
There are languages, for instance, which have as elaborate an apparatus of
negative forms for the verb as Greek has of the optative or wish-modality.

Compare page 93.

It is because of this classification of experience that in many a
languages the verb forms which are proper, say, to a mythical narration
differ from those commonly used in daily intercourse. We leave these shades
to the context or content ourselves with a more explicit and roundabout
mode of expression, e.g., "He is dead, as I happen to know," "They say he is dead," "He must be
dead by the looks of things."

We say "I sleep" and "I go," as well as "I kill him," but "he kills me." Yet me of the last example is; at least as close psychologically
to I of "I sleep" as is the latter to I of "I kill him." It is only by form
that we can classify the "I" notion of "I sleep" as that of an acting
subject. Properly speaking, I am handled by forces beyond my control when I
sleep just as truly as when some one is killing me. Numerous languages
differentiate clearly between active subject and static subject (I go and
I kill him
as distinct from I sleep, I am good, I am killed) or between
transitive subject and intransitive subject (I kill him as distinct from I
sleep, I am good, I am killed, I go). The intransitive of static subjects
may or may not be identical with the object of the transitive verb.

By "originally" I mean, of course, some time antedating the earliest
period of the Indo-European languages that we can get at by comparative
evidence.

Perhaps it was a noun-classifying element of some sort.

Compare its close historical parallel off.

"Ablative" at last analysis.

Very likely pitch should be understood along with stress.

As in Bantu or Chinook.

Perhaps better "general." The Chinook "neuter" may refer to persons as
well as things and may also be used as a plural. "Masculine" and
"feminine," as in German and French, include a great number of inanimate
nouns

Spoken in the greater part of the southern half of Africa. Chinook is
spoken in a number of dialects in the lower Columbia River valley. It is
impressive to observe how the human mind has arrived at the same form of
expression in two such historically unconnected regions.

In Yana the noun and the verb are well distinct, though there are
certain features that they hold in common which tend to draw them nearer to
each other than we feel to be possible. But there are, strictly speaking,
no other parts of speech. The adjective is a verb. So are the numeral the
interrogative pronoun (e.g., "to he what?"), and certain "conjunctions" and
adverbs (e.g., "to be and" and "to be not"; one says "and-past- go," i.e.,
"and I went"). Adverbs and prepositions are either nouns or merely
derivative affixes in the verb.

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